Afgantsy

by Rodric Braithwaite

  The men were then sent off for two weeks to a sanatorium in the countryside, where they were treated for stress. Some dealt with their stress in the traditional way, by drowning their nightmares in vodka. Leonid Gumenny found the adjustment hard: ‘I was tormented by terrible insomnia. I slept no more than two hours a night. My dreams were in colour, and before I could even get off to sleep I could smell shit, gunpowder, and blood—the smell of death. I was only able to get myself back together—more or less—six months later, after treatment in a sanatorium in Sochi.’

  The men of the Muslim Battalion flew home on 9 January. Before taking off they too were relieved by the military policemen of the KGB of all the souvenirs they had picked up after the battle—ornamental daggers, a couple of pistols, a transistor radio and a tape recorder. A rumour later circulated that the soldiers had brought home jewellery looted from the palace. But they had no more than their personal weapons and no documents with them at all. They knew that they had done something remarkable. But they also knew that their government was determined that the way Amin had been set aside should remain shrouded in the deepest secrecy. One young officer even believed that their aircraft might be shot down before they got home, to ensure that the evidence was destroyed. It was a bizarre and irrational thought: a sign of the strain they had been under, but a sign perhaps also of the way they saw the state which they had been prepared to serve so loyally.36

  PART II

  The Disasters of War

  We tried to teach the Afghans how to build a new society, knowing that we ourselves had failed to do so… Our army was given tasks which it was in no position to fulfil, since no regular army can possibly solve the problems of a territory in revolt.

  Ivan Chernobrovkin1

  – SIX –

  The 40th Army Goes to War

  The creation and deployment of the 40th Army may have been a triumph of improvisation. But there were many serious shortcomings, which might not have mattered so much if the army had been able to leave, as it had originally hoped, without much fighting and after little more than a year. But as the soldiers settled in, the weaknesses became painfully apparent: inadequate accommodation, lack of spare clothing for the troops, tasteless and unwholesome food, and primitive sanitary arrangements. Funds allocated to put things right were never forthcoming. The near collapse of the army’s health system which resulted was more damaging in its way than the effects of enemy action.

  At first the new army consisted mainly of understrength units from the military districts bordering on Afghanistan. These cadre units were manned only by a core of officers and warrant officers (praporshchiki), and had to be brought up to strength with local reservists: more than fifty thousand of them—officers, sergeants, and soldiers. Many were Uzbeks and Tajiks, though contrary to what many Western observers believed the soldiers from Central Asia fought well enough against their Afghan co-religionists. About eight thousand vehicles and other equipment were commandeered from local factories and farms. Even the local taxis were pressed into service to move the soldiers forward.1

  Responsibility for managing the mobilisation fell on the Central Asian Military District, with its headquarters in Alma Ata, and on the Turkestan Military District, with its headquarters in Tashkent.2 The two military districts had never attempted anything on this scale before, and the local authorities, the directors of factories and farms, the Voenkomats (recruiting offices), and the military units themselves were all unprepared for the task. In the interests of security they were told that the mobilisation was only an exercise, and so their main concern was to show how quickly they were capable of bringing units up to strength, regardless of quality. There was a serious shortage of specialists (drivers for the armoured vehicles, gunners, and so on), because the local reservists, like most Central Asian soldiers, had served in construction or motor-rifle units, where they had been unable to acquire the necessary specialist skills. Many reservists could not be found, because their names and addresses had not been properly recorded. Others produced false medical certificates or hid themselves so that they could not be served with their call-up papers. Many of the reserve officers were students: they had never actually served in the army and had no practical military skills, because they had received their training in the military faculties of their universities.

  By spring 1980 the 40th Army had been brought up to a strength of about 81,000 men, of which 62,000 thousand were in front-line units, equipped with six hundred tanks, fifteen hundred infantry fighting vehicles, nearly three hundred armoured personnel carriers, nine hundred artillery pieces, and five hundred fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters. The motley collection of civilian vehicles was soon sent back to their owners, and the reservists were replaced by professional officers and conscripts. The presence of these soldiers in Afghanistan was regulated by a bilateral agreement between the two governments, which set out the facilities which would be provided to the Soviet troops, the sixteen cities where they would be stationed, and the five airports from which their aircraft would operate.3

  The 40th Army eventually consisted of three motor-rifle divisions, an air-assault division, four independent motor-rifle regiments (brigades), two independent air-assault regiments (brigades), two special forces brigades, communications, intelligence, rear and repair units, and—uniquely—its own aviation corps of fighter bombers, helicopters, and transport planes, units for aircraft repair and airfield defence. At its maximum it mustered 109,000 men and women, supplemented by KGB frontier troops and specialised troops from the Ministry of the Interior. (See Annex 2, ‘Order of Battle of the 40th Army’, page 342.)

  The Task

  The task before the 40th Army and its commanders as they swept into Afghanistan may have seemed simple, clear, and limited. The Russians had intervened to put an end to the vicious feuding within the PDPA, and to force a radical change in the extreme and brutally counterproductive policies of the Communist government. The aim was not to take over or occupy the country. It was to secure the towns and the roads between them, and to withdraw as soon as the Afghan government and its armed forces were in a state to take over the responsibility for themselves.

  This may have looked like a strategy, but it turned out to be little more than an impractical aspiration. The Russians understood well enough that the problems of Afghanistan could only be solved by political means: Andropov had after all argued right at the beginning that the regime could not be sustained with Soviet bayonets. But they also hoped that the Afghan people would in the end welcome the benefits they promised to bring: stable government, law and order, health, agricultural reform, development, education for women as well as men.

  They discovered instead that most Afghans preferred their own ways, and were not going to change them at the behest of a bunch of godless foreigners and home-grown infidels. The Russians did not, and could not, address this fundamental strategic issue. The vicious civil war which greeted them had started well before they arrived and continued for seven years after they left, until it ended with the victory of the Taliban in 1996. It was a war in which loyalties were fluid and divided. Individuals and whole groups switched sides in both directions, or negotiated with one another for a ceasefire or a trade deal when the opportunity arose. Fighting and bloodshed erupted within each of the Afghan parties to the war as leaders and groupings struggled for advantage. The Russians found themselves fighting the worst kind of war, a war against an insurgency which they had not expected and for which they were not equipped or trained. All sides behaved with great brutality. There were executions, torture, and the indiscriminate destruction of civilians, their villages, and their livelihood on all sides. Like others who had entered Afghanistan before and since, the Russians were appalled at the violence and effectiveness of the opposition which faced them almost immediately and which made a mockery of their hopes.

  One day, both the Russians and the Afghans knew, the Soviets would go home. The Afghans would have to go on living in the country and with
one another, long after the last Russian had left. Even those Afghans who supported the Kabul government and acquiesced in the Soviet presence, or perhaps even welcomed it, had always to calculate where they would find themselves once the Soviets had departed.

  And there was another fundamental weakness in the strategic thinking of the Soviet government. They had underestimated—maybe they had not even considered—the eventual unwillingness of their own people to sustain a long and apparently pointless war in a far-off country. They were never of course faced by the massive popular movement in America which opposed the war in Vietnam. But a growing disillusion inside and outside government sapped the will of the leadership to continue a war that was brutal, costly, and pointless.

  These two misjudgements were sufficient to nullify the military successes of the 40th Army.

  The Commanders

  The 40th Army had seven commanders during its existence: Yuri Tukharinov, Boris Tkach, Viktor Yermakov, Leonid Generalov, Igor Rodionov, Viktor Dubynin, and Boris Gromov. Between 1975 and 1991 another eleven generals served as advisers to the Afghan armed forces. A number of these men, appalled by the humiliations inflicted on their army and their country, played a significant part in the politics surrounding the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the new Russia.

  These men were sophisticated professionals. They had attended the Academy of the General Staff. They had managed major military formations, run military districts inside the Soviet Union, and commanded armies outside it. In 1979 they still enjoyed the reflected glory of the victory over the Germans in 1945. They were paid more than other public servants except the KGB. They shared with the political leadership the basic objective of maintaining strategic parity with the United States, and the politicians were content that they should have the first claim on the country’s economic resources, provided they kept out of politics. Like professional officers elsewhere, they had been drilled during their training with a strong sense of military honour, duty, and patriotism. They were devoted to the glories of Russian military history. They kept themselves apart from civilian life, but they were quite sure that civilians should not be allowed to meddle in any aspect of military affairs. Even the Defence Minister, Dmitri Ustinov, did not in their eyes quite fit the bill. Despite his long connection with the military, he was a Party bureaucrat, not a professional officer.

  Some of these generals had seen action as junior officers in the Second World War. Many of them had served and a significant number had died in the Far East, the Middle East and Africa, where the Soviet Union had given active military support to Communist allies, to ‘progressive’ governments in the Third World, or to peoples seeking independence from their former colonial masters.4

  The generals had successfully deployed seventeen divisions into Hungary in 1956; and eighteen divisions, backed by eight Warsaw Pact divisions, into Czechoslovakia in 1968. Eighty-seven officers and 633 soldiers died in the operations against the Hungarian rebels. There was no fighting in Czechoslovakia, and only one officer and eleven other ranks were killed there. As an exercise in logistics, these were formidable achievements. But they were not the real thing. Unlike many of their American counterparts, the Soviet generals had no recent experience of managing large numbers of troops in battle. And they did not have the equipment, the training, the doctrine, or the experience to fight a counter-insurgency war in the mountains of Afghanistan.

  Although four Soviet generals perished in the fighting,5 the brunt was borne by colonels, majors, and captains, by young lieutenants, and of course by the ordinary soldier. Only a small proportion, less than 10 per cent, of the officers of the motor-rifle forces, the backbone of the army, went to Afghanistan. The rest were spread across the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe, ready for a major war with NATO while keeping a careful eye on the Chinese.

  Most Soviet officers genuinely believed in their professional duty to carry out the orders of their government. Even had they known about them, they would not have regarded the doubts which assailed the Soviet leadership as any of their business. At least to start with, they believed that they were indeed in Afghanistan to protect it from outside interference and domestic rebellion. Even as disillusion grew towards the end, some idealism remained. Anatoli Yermolin went to Afghanistan as a young lieutenant in 1987 and was in no doubt about the value of Soviet intervention. The doubts came later, when he returned home and became a liberal politician in the post-Communist Russian parliament.6

  By the time they arrived in Afghanistan, young men who had been through the Soviet officer schools were mostly reasonably well trained, or at least equipped to absorb the indispensable lessons they could only learn on the battlefield.

  Specialists were given extra training. After finishing at the Academy, Alexander Kartsev was sent off for a year’s further training in intelligence. By then the GRU had decided that they needed better local intelligence in Afghanistan. Technical means of gaining intelligence were proving inadequate. Aerial intelligence arrived too late. Radio listening stations did not work well in the mountains. They recorded a huge number of significant conversations on to ancient tape recorders, but there were not enough qualified interpreters to process the material. One solution, the GRU decided, was to imitate the French charity Médecins Sans Frontières and give selected intelligence officers basic medical skills. They would be welcomed in the villages, where they ought to be able to pick up much useful information.

  And so for two months Kartsev was trained by professors of medicine from Moscow, and learned the ‘Short Russian–Dari Phrase-book’ by heart. He was then sent off to a camp in Turkmenistan, where he learned mountaineering, shooting, mountain driving, and a bit more about the local languages. Then, after being issued with a Soviet passport and enjoying the unsympathetic attentions of the Soviet customs officials at Tashkent airport, he was posted to the 180th Motor-rifle Regiment in Kabul and served in Afghanistan from 1986 to 1988.

  He was assigned to a small post west of Bagram. Here he was involved in the raids, ambushes, and house-to-house searches which were the bread-and-butter tasks of such units. In addition he used his medical skills to gain the confidence of the headmen in the nearby village, or kishlak, and provide the villagers with simple medical services which were otherwise unavailable to them. Using this as cover, he was able to pick up local intelligence, and maintain a secure link with ‘Shafi’, an Afghan agent who had studied in Oxford and Japan. Kartsev guessed that ‘Shafi’ was acting as a go-between for Ahmad Shah Masud, the mujahedin commander in the Pandsher Valley. From ‘Shafi’ Kartsev acquired an intense interest in Eastern medicine, and after he left the army he turned the knowledge he had acquired in Afghanistan to good use, setting up his own massage practice in Moscow.7

  What Kind of a War?

  Like other counter-insurgency wars, the campaign in Afghanistan was not a war of set-piece battles and great offensives, of victories, defeats, and headlong retreat, and there was no front line. In such a war, there was little scope for generalship in the normal sense of the word. Nor was it a war which lent itself to easy narrative. It was not that the generals were still fighting the Second World War, though there was an element of that too. They had thought long and hard about the conditions of modern warfare, and they believed that they had made the necessary adjustments to fight such a war and win. Their mistake was to assume that if the army was well prepared to fight a major war, it could without too much adaptation successfully fight minor wars as well. The Americans had thought the same at the beginning of the Vietnam War. They had adapted their tactics, but never cracked the problem. Even though they had that example before them, the Soviet commanders had not worked out in advance how to deal with small, lightly equipped, and highly mobile groups of strongly motivated men moving across difficult terrain with which they were intimately acquainted. Until they had gained experience the officers and men of the 40th Army were not very good at this kind of war. And even though many of them adapted well enough, they were
in the end no more successful than the Americans at defeating their elusive enemy.

  The country in which the 40th Army now found itself could not have been more different from the European plains for which the Soviet army had trained. It might have been specially designed for the conduct of guerrilla warfare, for mountain skirmishes, ambushes along road and tracks, punitive expeditions, occasional massive operations by thousands of Afghan and Soviet soldiers to relieve a beleaguered garrison or smoke out a rebel base, mujahedin raids on Soviet and Afghan government outposts, brief fights around villages or on the outskirts of towns, destruction, retaliation, and great brutality.

  The mountains which cover four-fifths of Afghanistan sweep from the Pamirs in the east, where Tajikistan, India, Pakistan, and China join, almost to the frontier with Iran beyond Herat in the west. They divide the country from north to south, and the people into different and often hostile groupings who speak different languages, have different cultures, and for much of history had different religions as well. They are pierced by valleys and defiles, which are negotiable by people on foot: local farmers and shepherds, merchants, smugglers, travellers, tourists, hippies, and guerrilla fighters with their caravans of weapons. Proper roads are a luxury; until the twentieth century there were little more than tracks, passable enough by men and pack animals, but not at all friendly to wheeled traffic.